White House Claims Economic Recovery

The improvement in our budget picture since our forecast last July is an encouraging sign that the economic recovery is gaining momentum.
White House budget director Joshua Bolten

By reducing taxes we kept a promise, and we did the right thing at the right time for the American economy. President Bush, 10-16 in California

Back in the real world it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to tell us that the U.S. and the world are in a financial crisis continually deepened by the actions of our leaders. However 10 Nobel laureate economists did sign a joint statement, published in the New York Times, strongly condemning the Bush gang’s wholesale robbery of the federal Treasury:

This fiscal deterioration will reduce the capacity of the government to finance Social Security and Medicare benefits as well as investments in schools, health, infrastructure, and basic research. Moreover, the proposed tax cuts will generate further inequalities in after-tax income.

While Bush takes credit for a deceptive economic recovery that is solely based on corporate profits (which never trickle to us; didn’t we learn with Reagan) one need look no further than the U.S. Bureau of the Census for contradictory information. A late-September Census report revealed that the Bush gang has led the richest country in the world to it’s second consecutive year of deepened poverty and lower wages. According to the Census, 12.1% of Americans, including 12.1 million children live below the poverty line. Remember this is a slanted statistic to begin with since the federal government’s definition of what poverty is doesn’t apply to the real world that you and I live in. A single person is only considered to be living in poverty if their income is less than $8,980/year. For a family of four the poverty line is set at $18,400/year. Quite similar to the government excluding people whose benefits expire from unemployment statistics, this number may sound bad but reality is several-fold worse.

Being that the leader of the free world does not read it is quite convenient that he can borrow a Secret Service agent’s binoculars and peer out of his TV room window to see real world poverty experienced by residents of Capitol Hill. He in fact has an advantage over someone reading a Census report there because it is impossible to fully understand the scope of the situation through numbers alone. The abject conditions faced by a growing number of Americans are real and in the real world people struggle to correct the causes of such a calamity. To build a strong movement to defend ourselves from the crazed, addicted people who make consequential decisions we must win the hearts and minds of the American people not with numbers but with our stories. We don’t need to slant statistics or distort reality in any way because reality is so twisted and unfair, it needs no embellishment.

So the winner of Charlie’s inaugural Hustle of the Month is the Bush gang for insulting the intelligence of the people they supposedly represent by pissing on our backs and telling us it is raining. The gang, duly recognized by the world’s public as being the biggest threat to world peace, has already inflicted incredible damage to our country by intentionally bankrupting the Treasury, fighting illegal wars, funding space weapons, cutting education, supporting corporate profiteering in several industries including health care and energy, and the fact that I’m not done yet may be the grandest example of all. Each of these actions is a massive, frontal assault on poor and working people in the U.S. There is no better recipient of the first Hustle of the Month and it is likely the Bush gang will ‘win’ several more in the future.